Beyond pitching: Twitter, reputation, and what PR really does
Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder and creative director, makes an interesting statement in his post defending the micro-blogging service against charges of refusing to enforce its own terms of service:
Twitter is 16 employees made up of systems engineers and operators, product designers, and support specialists. We do not employ public relations professionals. This accusation caught us by surprise, putting us on the defensive in the middle of what continues to be a very busy work week.
So, Biz: You think maybe it’s time to think about getting some PR help?
(For a recap of the issue, in case you’re not up to speed, try this, this, and this...and don’t miss this, the post that started it all.)
Twitter falls into the “startup” category, and if you read Loic Lemeur, the founder of Seesmic, you’ll walk away with the impression that startups don’t need PR. All they need, as Loic puts it, is to “get a community and focus on your friends…PR is no secret science and it is not complicated. Or it was in the past, it is not anymore. No targets or ‘marketing pitch’ will get you very far anymore.”
If PR were only about pitches and coverage, I would wholeheartedly agree with Loic that PR has gotten easier, that most startup leaders can do much of it on their own, and that Twitter and other startups need no help.
Unfortunately, most people who make such observations about PR base their views only on what they observe. What they observe is pitching. PR pitches are blatant and, frequently, annoying. (Heck, I work in PR and get frazzled at the staggering number of clueless pitches I receive every day. In a PRWeek article, Wired.com’s senior editor, Dylan Tweney, articulates what a lot of victims of bad pitching feel: “I don’t have the luxury of blacklisting people, because if they have news, it doesn’t matter whether I like them or not, or whether they’ve been good at pitching in the past. I’ll still need to hear about it.”)
What’s not visible to most people, however, is the work that occupies most PR practitioners most of the time, and it isn’t pitching or getting ink. The mere fact that pitches are what you see most of the time doesn’t mean that’s the lion’s share of what goes on in most shops. If Loic were to spend a single day with an account team at any well-known agency, he’d probably amend his post.
I have a particularly close relationship with one big agency, which routinely brings me in to review their work. I have yet to see one case in which anybody was pitched. There’s a reason, after all, that pitching is a job relegated by most agencies to entry-level staff. It just ain’t a big enough deal in the grand scheme of PR things. Senior staff have bigger fish to fry.
Reputation, on the other hand, is a massive focus for PR practitioners. Twitter’s reputation has taken several hits recently, mostly due to the reliability of the service and the long stretches of time that pass before anybody at Twitter communicates anything about outages. Now there’s the Ariel Waldman issue. Regardless of who’s right and wrong, perceptions are being formed that could have long-term implications for Twitter. And while Biz and his team certainly don’t need PR to get coverage, it’s increasingly clear that they do need professional guidance when it comes to managing their reputation.
A good PR person would have made sure that Biz was not “caught by surprise.” He or she would have explored the ramifications of Twitter’s response, which seems to be, “Our terms of service were never violated but we’re changing them anyway.” He or she might well have advised Twitter to show some sympathy for a customer who felt abused by somebody using the service. There’s no admission of guilt in saying something along the lines of, “We never like hearing that our service was used to cause somebody pain, even if it didn’t violate the terms of service.”
None of this is about pitching. All too often, companies assume they can do their own PR, thinking that means they can build community instead of send lame pitches, then find out too late that they needed PR counsel after all. They just needed it for those skills that aren’t as visible as pitching.
Since it’s mostly communicators who read this blog, let me throw out this challenge: If you had been Twitter’s AOR, what would you have advised when the TOS issue arose?
05/26/08 | 13 Comments | Beyond pitching: Twitter, reputation, and what PR really does